


Sing to Me Brightly

by Minutia_R



Category: You Belong to Me - Cat Pierce (Song)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Light BDSM, M/M, Manipulation, Unhealthy Relationships, immortal/mortal relationships, that's rough buddy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 12:30:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18873259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: The moon, you see, had followed Feliks home.





	Sing to Me Brightly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Highsmith (quimtessence)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/gifts).



Like a fool or a drunkard, Feliks was walking alone on the shortest night of the year.

It must be admitted, he was somewhat drunk. The Margrave of S---- had opened his cellars in honor of the occasion, and he had some fine vintages. And then Krysia, in defiance of the law, had brought out a bottle of absinthe. After that, it was rather a blur.

But he hadn’t meant--even so--to do something so unlucky and downright dangerous. He’d started off towards his rooms with a group of friends. Then Kasper and Jakob decided it would be just too romantic to share lingering kisses among the snow-studded angels in the graveyard, and Krysia had stumbled into an alley to be sick, and somehow Feliks found himself without a single companion. Frightened almost sober by the realization, he would have attached himself to some group or other, but the street was empty. And then the wind blew up, and the clouds scudded away, and the snow stopped, and the moon hung bright and gibbous over Feliks’s shoulder.

He fled as fast as his feet would carry him to his rooms, where his landlord and landlady were still loudly celebrating, and flung himself down on his bed. But by that point it was too late. The moon, you see, had followed him home.

#

Feliks didn’t sleep that night. At first he blamed his landlord’s carousing, and then he blamed the headache that was putting the last of his drunkenness to rout, but neither of these were to blame. It was, quite simply, a melody. A sequence of notes so bright, so pure--he could hear it in his mind’s ear and feel it in the tips of his fingers. It gave him no rest until finally, in the first gray light of dawn, he crept down to the taproom. When he seated himself at the piano, pain thudded at his temples and bile burned his throat, but when he teased forth the tune from instrument’s chipped and yellowed keys, all of that vanished. He was filled up with the song, lost in it.

It might have lasted a moment. It might have lasted a month. The last notes faded into silence for a single, glorious instant, to be replaced by a scattering of applause. Feliks turned around, blinking. The morning after Midwinter Night, and the taproom was as full as if it had been a festival evening, and he hadn’t even noticed them coming in.

#

Two weeks later, Feliks once again went to the Margrave of S----’s manor. But instead of being one of the rabble admitted to the ballrooms for the Margrave’s one-night-a-year generosity, he was picked up at his door by the Margrave’s own coach. It rattled through the streets, and Feliks drew back the curtain to feel the icy wind on his face. The stars were extraordinarily bright; it was moon-dark.

Servants ushered him into a conservatory, an intimate space after the enormous ballrooms, but still nearly large enough to swallow the entire house Felix lived in. The very feel of the piano bench he sat on, and the smoothness of the keys, was money. The song that he played, however, was the same as it had been in the taproom after Midwinter Night--a world of its own, no matter what instrument it was played on. He played that one, and two more that had come to him since just as easily. Between them, he played works of celebrated composers, familiar to everyone in the room, but which had also undergone some strange alchemy beneath Feliks’s fingers since that night.

While he played, he felt untouchable, but when he stopped to rest, ladies looked at him over the edge of lace fans and made witty remarks that he didn’t know how to answer. Footmen drifted in and out silently, and he watched them with a sour turn of his stomach and the conviction that they were about to toss him out like the intruder he was.

While he was thinking these things, a gentleman approached him, holding a glass of wine in either hand--he looked perhaps a few years younger than Feliks himself, and richer than anything Feliks had yet seen in the manor. His white coat was embroidered with gray silk that matched the fabric of his breeches, a silver watch chain glittered across his slim but shapely chest, and his hair, too, was silver, an effect too lustrous to have been achieved with powder.

“Forgive the imposition,” said the man. “Everyone has heard of the city’s new musical prodigy, but you have no idea who I am.”

Had Feliks given offense somehow? Flustered, he could only shake his head.

The man smiled with one corner of his mouth as if Feliks had made some clever riposte. “My name is Menuo. Your playing is beautiful.” He handed Feliks a glass of wine, leaning in close to whisper against his ear, “You are beautiful too.”

“Thank you,” Feliks stammered, downing his wine in one gulp. It was fragrant and crisp, and chilled his throat.

#

Feliks returned to his rooms after the performance, but not in the Margrave’s carriage.

#

It might have been a moment; it might have been a month. How could Feliks count time with Menuo’s gorgeous coat thrown over Feliks’s rickety chair, revealing an even more gorgeous body underneath? With Menuo teasing him open with cool fingers and sinking sharp teeth into his lower lip? Or on his side in his narrow bed, one of Menuo’s legs thrown over him, pushing into him while his hand brought Feliks crashing onto the shore of ecstasy?

In fact it was two days before Feliks emerged from his rooms, and then only because he awoke from a doze to find Menuo gone, without leaving behind a note, a card, or so much as a scrap of fabric. He ran down to the taproom, frantic, but none of the few patrons deep in their cups had seen anything. Nor was there any sign in the street below. Only the usual evening traffic of pedestrians, delivery carts, and a rattling cab or two, and a crescent moon hanging low above the buildings.

At last, Feliks returned to the taproom. He opened the dingy window as far as it would go, seated himself at the piano, and, bathed in moonlight, began to play.

#

A week passed before Feliks broke down and wrote to the Margrave of S----. Menuo had been a guest at his private party, and it was the only lead Feliks had, and the Margrave was by the way of being a patron of Feliks’s, so it wasn’t really improper to write him, was it?

He got back a terse reply that, in the future, if he found himself in difficulties, he should apply to the Margrave’s man of business, one Seymon D----. The Margrave disavowed any knowledge of anyone answering to Menuo’s name or description, but he did include a bank draught for five hundred marks.

Feliks would rather have had Menuo. But as that seemed impossible, the five hundred marks would have to do.

#

The next month found Feliks at the Grand Ballet, as the director of the Ballet wished to stage some of Feliks’s pieces, and required new arrangements. Rehearsals, of course, were closed to the public, but a few wealthy and influential patrons nevertheless gained attendance--those who loved the arts better than seeing and being seen in the opera season, those whose jealousy for the artists they sponsored exceeded reason, and those who simply enjoyed the cachet of seeing a performance before mere mortals could. When, during a pause in his playing, Feliks’s gaze slid from the dancers to the scattered audience, his breath caught at a figure with his tall black hat tilted low over his eyes, and his voluminous black greatcoat slightly open to reveal a glittering silver watch chain.

So. Spend one night--well, two days--in the company of some slumming aristo, and Feliks’s brain insisted on conjuring him up based on the slimmest resemblances. Feliks cursed himself for a fool and went back to his music.

After the rehearsal, as Feliks was getting ready to go home, the company’s principal dancer caught him up in the cloakroom.

“A page delivered these to my dressing room by mistake,” she said, handing him four pure white roses tied with a silver ribbon, “but they’re for you.”

“Me?” Feliks was astonished. But the card attached to the ribbon had his name written on it in a fine, flowing hand that might have been a man’s or a woman’s. Aside from that, and an embossed seal of a disc topped by a crescent, the card was blank.

And as he stepped out into the night, a man was waiting for him by the exit, wearing a tall black hat, a voluminous black coat, and a silver watch chain across his chest. From the chain, as Feliks now remembered, a couple of silver charms hung--a disc and a crescent, like the seal on the card. He seized Feliks by the shoulders and kissed him on the mouth, saying “There you are! I missed you.”

“Did you?” Fury rose in Feliks, along with the temptation to smash the roses into Menuo’s face. “Then why haven’t I seen you for a month? Why have all my inquiries after you met with silence and denials? I thought I would never see you again--couldn’t you at least have left me a note?”

“For what purpose? I came back as soon as I could.” After a moment the puzzled frown on Menuo’s face was replaced with a grin. “You missed me too! How wonderful!”

It wasn’t wonderful. It had been miserable. But there was Menuo, glittering in the starlight, and Feliks couldn’t bear to push him away. “Don’t do it again,” said Feliks feebly. “Don’t leave me with no word.”

Menuo placed a gloved hand over his heart. “I won’t.”

#

That night Menuo bound Feliks’s wrists with a cravat of the finest silk Feliks had ever felt. He teased him with mouth and hands so long that Feliks nearly wept, then shoved his knees up and took him without ceremony, and that was enough to make Feliks spend before Menuo could. The next day Menuo fed him tidbits by hand, shivering at the touch of Feliks’s lips and teeth, and soon they fell into bed again, with clutching hands and hungry mouths.

The second night, Feliks turned in his sleep, sated and sore, unsure of what had woken him. His window was open and his bed was cold, and Menuo’s card lay on the pillow beside him. Feliks fumbled to light his candle and read the message, which was: Until next time.

Beyond that, and the crescent-shaped marks of Menuo’s nails on Feliks’s thighs, there was no sign he had ever been there.

#

Feliks’s ballet was a success. He was invited to play in more drawing rooms than he had days in a week. He could have afforded to move out of his cramped rooms in an unfashionable quarter, but he didn’t. His days and nights with Menuo had been spent there, and he had played all his new compositions first on the piano in the taproom. If he left, who knew if Menuo or inspiration would ever find him again?

He could also afford a bottle of absinthe, and he bought one, and drank it among the stone angels of the graveyard with Krysia and Kaspar and Jakob.

“Fame has been treating you ill,” Krysia observed, touching a finger to the dark circles which, Feliks’s shaving mirror told him, had recently taken up permanent residence beneath Feliks’s eyes. “Have those aristos been poisoning you?”

Feliks shrugged her hand away. “It’s nothing. I don’t eat in their houses, anyway.”

It was true. Not that the offer was never made, but Feliks’s appetite lately wasn’t what it had once been. After eating from Menuo’s hands, all other food had started to seem vaguely repulsive.

Jakob raised the bottle in salute. “No skinflints like the rich, eh?” he said, then took a swallow and leaned over to kiss Kaspar.

Feliks tried to imagine himself and Menuo like that, sitting on a gravestone with their arms around each other, sharing a bottle with his friends and chatting about nothing. He couldn’t picture it. Instead he reached for the bottle back.

“Not you, of course, Feliks,” said Kaspar, reaching out to ruffle Feliks’s hair. “Say the word and we’ll spirit you away from all this. If we don’t look out for you, who will?”

#

True to his word, Menuo showed up in Feliks’s rooms the next month. When Feliks asked who had let him up, Menuo answered with a maddening smile and fingers at Feliks’s throat, undoing hs cravat. It was impossible for Feliks to remember what was troubling him with the weight of Menuo’s body against his, with the whisper of breath in his ear.

But Feliks would not, would not, let Menuo escape unseen again. And so on the second night, though Felik’s senses were just as dazed with Menuo as ever, he feigned sleep, and when Menuo slipped out of bed beside him, he watched with slitted eyes.

Menuo dressed carefully: smallclothes, shirt, breeches, vest, coat, cravat. Last of all he returned his watch to his pocket and fastened his watch-chain, with its glittering charms, across his chest. Then he opened the window.

Was Menuo leaving through the window? Impossible. He was slim, but a child would have been hard-pressed to squeeze himself through the narrow window of Feliks’s bedroom. As Feliks watched however, Menuo fingered his watch chain, the disc, the crescent. He whispered some words to himself that Feliks didn’t catch--and then he disappeared. Feliks abandoned pretense and leapt from his bed to the window in time to see the clouds part to reveal the new moon.

A note sat on Feliks’s pillow, which read: Until next time.

#

So. Feliks’s aristocratic lover was the moon. In a dazed way, he found he could accept that. And the songs, which had always come to him in moonlight--it wasn’t Menuo or inspiration; they were one and the same.

And if he tossed Menuo out on his ear next moon-dark, if he accepted Kaspar’s offer to spirit him away, if he refused to play the songs that rushed into his mind unbidden, would it work? Would Menuo back off and leave him alone, as easily as that? And could Feliks live without Menuo’s touch, without the bright music?

One thing was becoming increasingly clear: he couldn’t live long with them. He had no stomach for food, and ate only with difficulty. Though spring was coming on, he went everywhere in a greatcoat and shawl, and was still never warm. Lately, his hands had begun to shake, and steadied only when he sat down at the piano.

Feliks spent a month in agonizing indecision. But by the time Menuo next paid him a visit, he’d made up his mind.

#

It had never been as good. Not even the first time. When Menuo rolled Feliks into bed, Feliks rolled him on his back and licked and bit his way down Menuo’s flawless skin as Menuo cried out in pleasure. He took Menuo in his mouth, sweeter than wine. And all the time Feliks knew, and dreaded, what was approaching.

And dreaded, though he had no idea, how it would end.

For when Menuo lay in Feliks’s bed, his eyes bound by his cravat and a smile of delicious anticipation on his face, Feliks went through the pile of his discarded clothes, retrieved the watch, and locked it in a secret drawer.

And surely enough, the second night, Feliks felt Menuo’s hands on his shoulder, shaking him awake.

“My watch! Where is it?”

Feliks blinked wearily. His possessions were scattered throughout the room, evidence of a desperate search. But Menuo hadn’t found the watch. “I took it,” Feliks said simply.

“Give it back!” Menuo’s eyes were wide and frantic in the dark, his teeth bared dangerously.

Feliks laughed--anger, lust, and fear all rising together within him in an intoxicating cocktail--and said, “Make me.”


End file.
